Chasing Virtue

By DANI SHAPIRO

Published: December 24, 2010

Early in “Poser,” Claire Dederer describes a regular walk she takes with a new-mom friend in her North Seattle neighborhood: “We made a circle around Green Lake, and so our talk traveled. We started with our babies and tried to decipher all the new rules we had to follow. The talk opened out to work, maybe briefly touched the real world, and then, like a tight magic circle, closed back in on babies again. It was a dark enchantment.”

Illustration by Olimpia Zagnoli

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This dark enchantment with the joys, rigors and travails of building a family life is at the center of this fine first memoir, and it’s heartening to see a serious female writer take such a risky step into territory where writers of literary ambition fear to tread, lest they be dismissed as trivial. Bills, laundry, cooking, breast-feeding, baby sitters, holidays, aging parents — P. J. O’Rourke put it this way: “Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.”

Dederer — a highly self-aware, clever book critic who has contributed to The New York Times Book Review — not only takes on this bad wallpaper as a subject, but she does so within the framework of her discovery of our New Age national pastime: yoga. Yoga! Let the eye-rolling begin. But what makes “Poser” work on a lot of levels is that first in line to ask searching questions and poke fun is the author herself.

“We were a generation of hollow-eyed women, chasing virtue,” she tells us. “We, the mothers of North Seattle, were consumed with trying to do everything right.” North Seattle — a first cousin of Park Slope, the Upper West Side, Berkeley and dozens of other such enclaves around the country — was a place where attachment parenting was all the rage. Kids weren’t weaned until they spoke in full sentences. Families all slept in the same bed; ate the same organic, locally produced food; and lived in an enriching environment safe from the dangers of plastic toys and disposable diapers.

But chasing virtue was making Dederer miserable. By the time she strolled into her first yoga class — yoga being the panacea of the demographic of which she was reluctantly and yet somehow also enthusiastically a part — Dederer was in all kinds of (she would be the first to tell you) white, middle-class, we-should-all-have-such-problems pain. On the surface, she was a paragon of marital and familial contentment, but deeper down, she was lonely and panicked. Her marriage had become unrecognizable, like a facsimile of itself: “Our anxieties were driving us to become other people — he was Earner, I was Mother, like characters in some phenomenally boring Ionesco play,” she writes. She was constantly terrified in the wake of her daughter’s harrowing birth, which left the baby temporarily in quarantine and hooked up to an oxygen tank. “The bargain was this: I will do everything perfectly and avert disaster. My idea of motherhood grew from this bargain.”)

But Dederer was willing to go to great lengths to keep up appearances. “I was resolute and cheerful; I was scared all the time,” she tells us. “What I felt had nothing to do with how I acted.” This, after all, was a woman who had decided to hold her wedding outdoors — on a frigid late October weekend — because she believed that the significant and persistent tremor in her hand would be less noticeable to wedding guests as she held her bouquet. Dederer’s tremor calls to mind a story I once heard from a friend who went to see a psychoanalyst who suffered from a facial tic. When my friend asked the analyst about his tic, the analyst responded, “Life leaves its scars on all of us.”

The origins of Dederer’s scars can be traced to 1973, when her parents separated but did not divorce. Dederer was 6, and she and her brother spent the remainder of their childhoods shuttling between their parents, a blur of ferry rides across Puget Sound, a series of eccentric living situations ranging from chicken coops to boats (she beautifully describes her father living on a houseboat with a water bed as “doubly at sea”). Her mother lived with a tugboat-captain boyfriend, but stayed married to Dederer’s father in an arrangement that baffled their children and allowed for no closure. So when Dederer became a wife and mother herself, it comes as no surprise that she wanted to be nothing less than a steady and steadying embodiment of maternal virtue — scars be damned — all the while judging herself with her own, critical, self-lacerating eye.

Yoga, for Dederer, started out as an attempt to fix something that was wrong: not just searing back pain, but her tremor, her anxiety, her anhedonia, her judgemental nature, her marriage. She wasn’t sure exactly what yoga was. A spiritual practice? Gymnastics for uncoordinated people? A gentle workout for rich women with too much time on their hands? She worried about adopting another culture’s cosmology. “Was there something inherently inauthentic about it?” She moved restlessly from one type of class and teacher to another, in search of answers and solid facts — something to hold on to — but instead arrived at ever deepening mystery. She also found an elegant structure for her memoir, in which she uses various yoga poses (mountain pose, downward dog, triangle, headstand) not only as a pithy way to tell her story, but as something quite a bit deeper than that.

In yoga philosophy, there is a beautiful word, samskara,which loosely translates into our mental patterns, our deepest stories, which we hold in our bodies, like rings inside a tree. The practice of yoga can reveal our samskaras — as can the practice of writing. In some of Dederer’s most elegant and moving passages, her samskaras — which she has tamped down just like that tremor on her wedding day — rise up through the poses themselves. In cobbler’s pose (seated, bending forward, feet touching to form a diamond), she surprises herself by suddenly weeping, reliving her daughter’s traumatic birth. In foot-behind-the-head pose (fairly late in the book, and don’t try this at home, folks!), she writes: “I sat there with my foot behind my head, like a moron. Who puts their foot behind their head? I sat there and, sitting, realized: I was very, very unhappy.” Dederer’s husband had grown increasingly distant and depressed, their once strong bond frayed almost to the breaking point. The pose allowed the feeling to emerge: “I was trapped in a misery of expectations, as if in a blizzard. I was afraid that if I stopped, if I said, ‘Something is wrong here,’ my family would fall apart. After all, that is what families do.”

“Poser” is a powerful, honest, ruefully funny memoir about one woman’s open-hearted reckoning with her demons. I only wish that Dederer had trusted herself just a bit more. Ever the journalist, she has a well-honed instinct to provide backup, context, proof to support her circumstances, as if hedging against the possibility that this might be read simply as — God forbid! — a woman’s singular ­story. In numerous passages that seem hijacked from a scholarly essay, she supplies brief treatises on feminism, or attachment parenting, or the history of yoga. In these spots, it seems her inner “good student” won out. See? She seemed to be saying. This isn’t just about me — it’s a trend, a syndrome, a generation. Stop, I wanted to tell her. Breathe and stay still. Keep your gaze close to you. In the hands of a gifted writer, the universal is embedded within the personal. Guess what? Your bad wallpaper made for a lovely book.

Dani Shapiro’s book “Devotion: A ­Memoir” will be published in paperback in February.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 30, 2011

A review on Dec. 26 about “Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses,” a memoir by Claire Dederer, included a misattributed quotation. While Nietzsche was not one to shy away from home decorating tropes (“I cannot stand this motley wallpaper style,” he wrote of George Sand in “Twilight of the Idols”), he is not the author of the aphorism “Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper” — that was another great philosopher, P. J. O’Rourke.

A version of this review appeared in print on December 26, 2010, on page BR9 of the Sunday Book Review.